"Now is not the time to re-litigate either the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 or the decision to withdraw from it in 2011," William Kristol and Frederick Kagan write. Agreed! This is no time for blood-soaked proven idiot monsters to crawl back out and try to talk to us about war policy. Shut up forever.
Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty tries so hard to be loved, and yet. He makes exciting action films on a regular basis, he's apologized for once believing in science, he's released a cartoonish parody of a Republican economic plan, and he's all about the Jesus stuff. He is a full-service pander shop but scares away all the customers. What else can he do at this point? Go nuts about war, obviously.
It's unclear why Sarah Palin still keeps people around to write policy positions for her. Weren't we supposed to be over this running-for-president business due to its guaranteed failure? Maybe she's just burning through her PAC money for the hell of it. But it's not going to her longtime war-loving neocon confidantes anymore. She's just too disapproving of the latest war, Libya, for their tastes.
President Obama is seriously wearing on the patience of America's most war-loving war lovers, the Washington neoconservatives. Why won't Obama be reasonable and just let them have their endless War in Libya? Muammar Qaddafi is strengthening his grip and moving east, so the window of opportunity for invading another decentralized tribal country and then spending a dozen years there while alienating everyone in the region is closing. And so the neocons have banded together to write Obama a sternly worded letter asking for their war, please, now.
Ever since the Egyptian protests began two weeks ago, the conservative movement has been struggling to spread a lockstep message through its top spokespeople.
There are sketchy reports that Maj. Nidal Hasan tried to contact "people associated with Al Qaeda," and some are calling Ft. Hood "the largest single terror act in America since 9/11" — something both terrorists and wingnuts wish were true.
The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson had a clever cover story last week on Barack Obama's hometown of Hyde Park, Chicago, a neighborhood that functions almost entirely as the extended campus of the University of Chicago, where both Obamas once drew salaries. As a zip code, it's where black meets white (just dust off Allan Bloom's old social calendar) and sixties radicalism meets free-market conservatism (Bill Ayers wanders past the Milton Friedman Institute on his way to teach kids about the coming end of the bourgeoisie). However, the reputation for right-wingery, says Ferguson, is greatly exaggerated: "Of the tens of thousands of faculty who have taught at the University of Chicago over the past half-century, perhaps as many as 65 have, at some point in their lives, voted for a Republican." Is this just part of the new GOP strategy to scandalize Obama by refashioning the hothouse of conservative academia as "Berkeley with snow"? (The Google trend chart for "Hyde Park" shows no real change in searchability, so most of America isn't hip to the Democratic nominee's controversial hood yet. Also, press mentions of the locale don't seem to be spiking.) What's the Matter with Kansas? author Thomas Frank smells a rat:
So that giant hippie freak Choire was deeply moved and whatever by today's Times story on the sad state of the Bronx Family Court elevators. Pinko commie softie. Elevators are a privilege, not a right! If they've got a reason to be in family court, then they probably don't deserve modern mechanical conveniences anyway.
